Thomas Quinlan (impresario) - 1913 - 1914

1914

After their return to England in 1912, the company undertook a provincial tour (including a performance in Newcastle in March 1913), followed by visits to Ireland (with a performance at the Theatre Royal, Dublin on 14 May 1913) and South Africa (June to July 1913) on the way back to Australia, staging the first complete Ring Cycle in Australia.

Although The Ring was the highlight of the 1913 visit to Australia, there was another important Australian Wagner premiere, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, as well as the premieres of Louise (opera) and Manon Lescaut. Apart from these, it was the sheer number of operas performed which was so impressive. In just under eight weeks in Melbourne, the company performed 25 operas, including two Ring cycles; while in Sydney, where the original season of seven weeks was extended to nine because a strike in New Zealand made it impossible to move on there as planned, another three operas were added. In all, nine of the major Wagner operas were staged — all except Parsifal — four of them for the first time; all the major Puccini operas written at the time: Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, The Girl of the Golden West; the four most popular Verdi operas: Rigoletto, II Trovatore, La traviata and Aida; other Italian works: Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci and The Barber of Seville; The Marriage of Figaro; and an assortment of French operas, from the new Louise and The Prodigal Son, to The Tales of Hoffmann, Samson and Delilah and the old favourites Carmen and Faust. Not surprisingly, some had only one performance in each city, though most had two or three — sometimes by popular demand. Exceeding that number were only Bohème and Butterfly (four each in Sydney), Samson and Delilah (five in Sydney) and, way out in front, Hoffmann (seven in Melbourne, eight in Sydney), its total of fifteen more than twice that of the nearest competitor (Samson and Delilah with seven).

It was not simply a visit to Australia, but part of a tour round the world, what Quinlan himself in an interview on arrival in Sydney, called an "All-Red Tour" (a phrase which meant something rather different in the days before the sun set on the British Empire). The intention was to return to England via New Zealand and Canada, "never", said Quinlan, "leaving the red portions of the geographical map except to hop over the border from Canada to visit some of our American cousins.... We sing in English to English-speaking peoples all the time."

The era came to an end in March 1914 with a three-week visit of the Quinlan English Opera Co at His Majesty's Theatre, Montreal; Wagner's complete Der Ring des Nibelungen was sung in Canada for the first time (and by 1990 still the only time), along with Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, The Flying Dutchman, and Tristan und Isolde. But attendance was poor, and the company decided to cut its losses and terminate its visit to Canada, even though performances had already been announced for Toronto.

Unfortunately problems in New Zealand and Canada interfered with his grand plan of performing nine Ring cycles around the world in the space of six months, a feat he had been confident would "be mentioned with bated breath in European art circles", and the enterprise proved ruinous. Quinlan estimated that it "cost £150,000 a year to run grand opera round the world", and with disruptions to the schedule, the incomings were not enough to balance this figure.

Quinlan's enterprise came unstuck and he managed no more grand opera seasons. Despite the crash in Canada some artists had definitely been re-engaged and contracts signed. But the outbreak of World War I put paid finally to the possibility of Quinlan's plan to bring another company to Australia in 1915. The Quinlan Company became the Harrison Frewin Company, which was acquired by the impresario H B Phillips in 1916 for £1,750. In October 1918 the Carl Rosa Company acquired the Phillips and Harrison Frewin companies.